/lit/ - Literature

>>12418509
Both Buddha and Nietzsche believe in a version of Eternal Return and they both believe life is suffering onto death. They differ in their evaluation of the world, life, existence, suffering as eternally recurring. Whereas Buddha sees this sate of affairs as unfortunate, and imagines and prescribes a way out of existence, Nietzsche evaluates this state of affairs as ultimately perspectival, a matter of taste. He wouldn't disagree with Buddha's evaluation, i.e., his belief that life and suffering eternally recurring is worthless and to be avoided, escaped from. He'd say the Buddha and others like him are degenerate life, life incapable of tolerating living. To live properly for them is to do everything in your power, including castrating yourself, in order to avoid having to do it all over again.

Mind you, Buddha is no different than Plato in this regard. He too saw life as eternally recurring (in the Phaedo, for example), and he too prescribes an ascetic life, the life of the philosopher as he conceived of him, as the way out. "An unexamined life is not worth living," he says, and we usually stop there without wondering why. The truth is for Plato that an unexamined life is not worth living because life is not worth living. Examination of life, i.e. to becoming a philosopher, is the only way redeem the life you have because it's the only way to opt out of existence.

Both these sages, Plato and Buddha begin with assumptions about the value of existence. They believe their own taste or distaste for it is shared by everyone. It's impossible to see things differently. Even among the ranks of human beings that both of them construct, each rank possessing radically different perspectives of life and things in it, neither of them permits for someone to evaluate existence differently.

That is their starting point, and that is where they differ from Nietzsche. I happen to believe Nietzsche is right in his perspectivism regarding value, and specifically the value of existence understood as eternally recurring suffering onto death, and that people like Plato and Buddha, and Anaximander and Parmenides among others who invent a second world into which one can finally cease to be, have spiritualized their degeneration..pic related.